Yet these highly cultivated peoples, agitated by grand public passions, had absorbing, moving controversies--the struggles of the Gracchi, the banishment of Themistocles and Aristides, and the varying fortunes of Marius, of which no trace is found. Nor, for the rest, did the Latins, who were our masters, and were, as we are after them, copyists, followers in the footsteps of their Greek predecessors, readapt contemporary events to their dramatic lines. We in our turn, down to Goldoni and Molière, and even to this very century, have copied those ancient comic and tragic writers, warming them up afresh from Orestes and Clytemnestra, and from events which had not the least echo among us. Trissin, Maffei, and Alfieri delineated more or less, on one side tyrants, on the other tyrannicides, which have little to distinguish them from one another. So in Schiller and Goethe, all the passions are of the scene rather than of personages. Thus Faust, for example, and Margaret, are not persons who have a special character. They are, in fact, personages who cover a symbol, who would tell the story of literature, the story of the beautiful, the skepticism of knowledge, but they tell it with a number of interesting, moving facts, without delineating an individuality. Faust is neither very good nor very bad, since he with his easy way of speaking commits rogueries of every kind till finally he is redeemed. He is a scientific student with a passion for investigation, but in his enthusiasm, instigated by the devil or by doubt, he too often deserts the search for the truth for that of pleasure, too often forsakes the studies that had ennobled his life from youth, and as a man to enjoy the nights of the Brocken, and worse, the favors of Margaret, of Helen, till the moment when he redeems himself by saving a people; but he does this at the last instant, when he is about to die, and has nothing more to enjoy. Margaret, too, is a child like other children, who, like so many others, suffers herself to be beguiled by manly beauty, and has no good qualities except that of being able to die with fortitude, hoping with the penalty to expiate the sin, which is, in fact, more the devil's than hers. The elder Dumas invented an immense diverting confusion of facts, but his personages are always the same, and are the occasion, the instrument, the setting of the adventures.